


Sparked

by Feynite



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack, F/M, Family Bonding, crack ship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-11
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-06-01 18:16:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6530857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feynite/pseuds/Feynite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Come on, Pup,” he says, straightening and lifting her to her feet, too. “We can’t have you setting stray haystacks ablaze. If you’ve gone and found yet another talent to add to your repertoire, we’ll have to practice at it.”</p><p>She takes his hand.</p><p>“Does that mean there’ll be things I’m allowed to set on fire? For practice?” she wonders.</p><p>“Oh certainly,” her father says, giving her hand a squeeze. “We can start you off on burning the garbage.”</p><p>She wrinkles her nose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sparked

**Author's Note:**

> So. Yes. This is... F!Hawke/Elgar'nan fic? Inspired by tumblr. I blame the internet, look at what crack ships it's given me. I don't know how regularly or really even if this will be added to (I have a lot of projects, so, unless inspiration bites, posting this to entirely understandable crickets chirping will probably several reduce its odds of taking off) but... it exists! Hooray?

 

The eldest Hawke child is six years old and very, very sick.

A feeling that had started with a funny sense of not-right in her belly has since turned into a fever-hot delirium which is surely eating her up.  Mother is fussing over her, which she almost would like, because Mother hasn’t fussed over her since the twins were born.  She missed being fussed over. But she knows she’s not supposed to because the twins are just babies and they need it more.  She can hear them crying, sometimes, which she hates.  The sounds rattle in her head and keep her stuck half awake, much too hot and then suddenly much, much too cold.

She knows when her father comes home.  It feels like it takes ages and ages to happen, but then he’s arrived, and she feels his big, warm hand against her forehead.  She opens her eyes to look at him, but he’s all blurry.  She opens her mouth to speak to him, but her throat feels rubbed raw, and when her voice comes out it’s a hacking cough.  Father puts a hand to her chest and makes shushing noises, and whispers under his breath, and she feels a bit better for a while. She can see him then, looking at her with his brows all furrowed like angry caterpillars.

“Not doing too well, eh, Pup?” he asks in his very softest voice.

“’M sick,” she replies.

He reaches back up to her forehead and pushes away a few strands of sticky hair.

“Don’t worry.  We’ll get you well again,” he promises, but suddenly he sounds like he’s miles and miles off, talking to her across a long field instead of just overhead.  She’s scared. Something inside of her feels really _wrong_ , even though she doesn’t know what.  She doesn’t want to go to sleep, but she feels like she has to.  She blinks, and her father’s mouth is moving, but she can’t hear him at all anymore. That’s even scarier.  Has she gone deaf, like the old beggar who sleeps in the chantry?  Her heart plummets, and black spots eat up her vision, bit by bit, until there’s nothing left of it anymore. Someone calls for her, but she can’t manage to answer them.

The next time she wakes up, it’s very dark.

There’s a candle lit nearby, almost burned down to the base.  It catches her attention because Mother and Father never leave candles burning, because it’s a waste of good coin, but there it is.  A burning candle, with some odd, unfamiliar necklace wrapped around it. Her head’s all foggy, and so it takes her a minute to realize that she’s tucked into her parents’ big bed.  She feels too heavy to move.  Even her head feels too heavy to turn, but she looks around anyways.  Mother’s sleeping on her side of the bed, curled up around her and on top of the covers, which is silly.  Even sillier still is her father, who’s only half on the bed; his other half is on the floor, like he was kneeling there and just sort of fell over. One of his big hands is around Marian’s. It’s sweaty, so she manages to work up enough energy to wriggle free.  As soon as she does, her father’s eyes fly open.

For one whole second, she’s almost sure that they’re shining like stars.

“Pup?” he says, and he swallows like something’s caught in his throat.

Before she can even answer him, though, he puts his hands on her cheeks, and to her utter amazement, he starts to _cry._

She has never, ever, _ever_ seen her father cry before.  It’s the most terrifying thing she’s ever witnessed, and she starts to cry, too, because she doesn’t even know what she’s done to make it happen.  Her father scoops her up into his arms and shushes her, and kisses the top of her head and tells her it’s alright now.  Then her mother wakes up and starts crying as well, and that makes her panic a bit, but she can’t even ask what’s going on.  It doesn’t seem like she’s in trouble, though.  On the other side of the room, the twins decide that if everyone else is going to wake up and cry then they might as well, too, and she sighs into her father’s shirt as they start to scream.

Her father whispers something, and suddenly the air around her goes soft and muted instead.  It makes her sleepy again, but this time, when he slides her back onto the pillow, she’s not scared.  The wrong-feeling is gone.

There’s a new, subtler, not-quite-right-feeling where it used to be instead.

 

~

 

When she’s nine years old, fire blooms at her fingertips.

She’s watching the twins while their mother is busy getting their family’s two little goats back into the barn, and telling Carver a story with two of Bethany’s dolls, while Bethany digs up some garden worms with her little hands, when she snaps her fingers and accidentally sets a doll’s hair on fire. Carver laughs and claps, and Bethany cries, and when their mother comes and finds them she’s still got her hands buried in a water trough while Carver attempts to console his sister by hitting her with the burnt doll.

Their mother is not impressed, until the truth comes out.

And then she looks afraid.

By the time their father gets home, the twins are down for their nap. Their little house is quiet. It’s a humble place, on the very outskirts of the village they at, and if she tries she can remember back to when they first came to it. Before the twins were born, when they’d had to move out of the city because something bad had happened to some friends of her father’s, who knew his Very Big Secret, and might have accidentally told someone about it while they were in pain. Father wasn’t mad at his friends at all, he’d assured her. He’d been sad to see something bad happen to them at all. But it would be safer to leave.

And there had been much enthusing over life in the countryside, she recalls. She hadn’t much cared for the wagon trip down, and her mother had been very sad and a little uncertain about the whole thing. So she’d gone and picked her some wildflowers from the side of the road, and gotten her first bee sting. And her mother had fussed of it as her palm swelled, and things had seemed more like normal, until they’d finally reached the house that her parents had managed to get, through friends-of-friends and an agreement with a local village that was in need of herbalist, which was what her father did.

Then Mother had looked around the tiny little house, with its holes in the roof and its rat nest in the corners, and the big barn full of owls and bird droppings and broken beams, and cried. She always remembers the crying. She remembers trying to make it into laughter, instead. Making faces and poking fun at some of the odd things, and waiting until she could see her mother smile again. A strange, frayed panic beating in her chest.

But that was a long time ago. In the end they’d patched the roof, and fixed the beams in the barn, and now all she can think is that the little house is maybe too small for the twins, sometimes, with how noisy they can be. But it’s also warm and cozy and familiar.

It’s home. It’s safe. But she’s reminded of the days when it wasn’t, of their trips down the long road, when her father gets home and her mother pulls him aside, that brittle fear in her eyes and worry in her brow as the two of them have a long, whispered conversation.

Bit by bit, her father’s shoulders slump.

He’s usually tired after a long day in the village. He walks a lot, her father. He has long strides and a steady pace. But when he finally turns towards her, as she sits and fidgets and wonders if maybe a joke would help, he moves slow.

“Hello, Pup,” he says, crouching in front of her.

“Would you believe the twins did it?” she asks. “They must be prodigies!”

She knows what it means, after all. She’s trying not to think about it but she knows what it means to have magic come from her fingertips. It means she’s like her father. And she wouldn’t mind that, not really, but she knows it’s not what her parents want, either. People like her father get taken by _Templars._

Making fire means they’ll hunt her, too, when it comes to it.

It means she’ll never get away from that.

Her father smiles a bit, and lowers a hand to her head. He musses her hair, and then bops her nose. And then he lets out a great, big breath.

“Come on, Pup,” he says, straightening and lifting her to her feet, too. “We can’t have you setting stray haystacks ablaze. If you’ve gone and found yet another talent to add to your repertoire, we’ll have to practice at it.”

She takes his hand.

“Does that mean there’ll be things I’m _allowed_ to set on fire? For practice?” she wonders.

“Oh certainly,” her father says, giving her hand a squeeze. “We can start you off on burning the garbage.”

She wrinkles her nose.

 

~

 

Fire comes easily.

Sometimes other things do, too, but on that front, it wavers a bit. Ice is tricky. It prefers to be water. Healing spells are nigh impossible. The first few times she tries it the blood goes… funny, and her father puts that part of the lessons aside with a worried look, and she gets her first long lecture on blood magic, which makes her curl her nose a bit again because it sounds disgusting.

Not even morally reprehensible – although her father is sure to establish that, too. But just very gross, she thinks. Is there spit magic, too? Pee magic? She asks her father and he looks a bit pained when he laughs.

“It’s a fair question,” she insists. “Blood and pee and spit all come out of the body. And if there’s such a thing as pee mages, then Carver’s probably one.” There is a part of her memory that consistently recalls all the times he peed on her when he was an infant, and how deeply unpleasant it all was. _Bethany_ never peed on her.

Her father does a bad job of pretending like he isn’t amused.

“You are not to call your brother any sort of mage, even in jest,” he says. “And _no._ Blood is unique.”

It’s also off-limits, though that doesn’t bother her much, in the end. She’s still best with fire, and even though her mother laments many scorched bedsheets and curtains, it does make lighting the hearth and burning the trash and doing other such chores while her father is away much easier than before.

Bethany’s not a big fan of the flames, but Carver loves them. He totters after her on his chubby little legs, and tries to make his own fire go by imitating her. She puts their mother’s oven mitts on him one afternoon, and distracts him by making little tiny flames, and letting him bat them out by smacking them.

Something about the fire magic makes the corners of her father’s eyes strain just a bit, though.

And then a year after she makes her first spell, she goes on a shopping trip into the village with her mother and the twins, and accidentally falls off the back of their cart. She makes a spark when she hits the ground.

It’s entirely by accident, and it doesn’t last long. But her mother sees, and then worries that someone else might have seen. And then a week later there’s a lot of talk of how their little peasant house really _is_ too small with the twins getting bigger, and a few months later, they’re on the road again. Heading further south, through fields and woods, past a few other villages to a little town near the mountains. There’s talk of dragons in one of the villages they stop in.

Dragons swooping in and stealing livestock, the rumours go. Heading off to make a roost in the Frostbacks.

Out of caution, their parents delay the trip a bit more, and settle on a different route that takes them closer to the woods instead. Through narrow roads that are rougher than the big ones, and almost too small for their square cart to pass over.

“What sort of roads are these, Malcolm?” her mother asks, as birds sing in the trees, and the leaves sway with the breeze.

“Dalish,” her father replies.

“Wild elves?” her mother exclaims, and her eyes dart towards the trees.

“Better them than dragons. At least elves can be talked to,” her father says. “Besides which, they’ll be well out of these woods in this season. Summer hunting’s much better further in the wilds, and with the snow melted, they can reach richer campgrounds without risk of a blizzard or mudslide cutting them off.”

Her mother raises an eyebrow.

“And since when do you know so much about the habits of Dalish elves?” she asks.

Her father chuckles.

“Leandra, my dear, you should know by now that strange talents make for strange bedfellows,” he says.

“Hmm,” says her mother.

“It’s possible, also, that the woodcutter who works this region makes a habit of noting such things, and shared her insights with me,” her father allows, with a wink.

Still, they have to spend the night camping out amidst the trees. Not that it’s unpleasant. Her mother and the twins take the little tent, and her father sets up in the wagon with her. They’re all exhausted, so sleep comes quickly.

Her father told her, when her magic started coming, that she would have to be careful of her dreams.

 _Never make a promise in a dream,_ he told her. _No matter what._

Most of her dreams aren’t the kind to ask her to promise anything anyway. Usually she just dreams about things like swimming through clouds, or doing her usual boring chores, or sometimes she has nightmares about running from things, or walking into the house to find it’s all filled up with the twins’ dirty diapers, and she has to burn them all before mother gets back for some reason.

When she sleeps in the wagon, curled under her father’s arm, she dreams that she’s walking through the forest.

All the way through the forest, and then up a winding trail, and onto a mountain. She dreams that there are big torches all around, and snow that falls into them and melts where it does. From the top of the mountain she can see a long, sharp drop, into a valley full of scorch marks. The wing carries the snow into it, and churns it into whirling, winding tornadoes where it does.

She stares down it, and the looks up and sees the sun blazing overhead of it.

When she turns around to look at the mountaintop behind her, though, she wakes up to her father’s hand giving her a shake.

They make it to the village before they need to camp again.

And in truth, the little house they come to this time isn’t much bigger than their last one. She misses their goats, and their thatched roof, and the barn, and their familiar garden mud. The soil here is harder, though there are three rooms in the little house, rather than just two. She still has to share with the twins, but it’s easier, now. And her mother doesn’t cry this time.

Even so, the novelty of a new place wears thin on the twins by evening, and Bethany is a bit teary-eyed and Carver is clingy, so she spends her first night in their room alone as the twins snuggle in with their parents.

Part of her wants to go and join them. Just make a whole big pile of Hawkes. But she’s too big, she thinks, to go sneaking into her parents’ bed. She can’t even blame it on the cold, not when she can make her own warmth fly from her fingertips.

So she stays put.

When her eyes slide shut, she dreams of climbing out of her window, and walking out into the woods. And she goes up the mountain again. Up and up, past the gaping chasm. Through the flurries of snow, to a plateau surrounded with even more burning sconces. The fire looks strange to her eyes. Too bright and yellow, and white at the middle of it. The biggest sconces burn around an altar. Polished and gleaming, where a statue of an elven man stands with his arms cast up above his head, as if to catch something. But his face is turned down, towards the altar.

As she watches, the sun begins to set; and it seems to sink into the statue’s stone hands.

She takes a few steps forward, and finds that there are odd letters carved into the stand. And there’s an indent, too. A funny little shape, as if it’s been perfectly sized for something to fit into it.

She traces a finger over it, before she wakes up again.

 

~

 

The dreams happen, sometimes.

She doesn’t know what to make of it, but at first, she doesn’t worry much about it, either. Most of the time she stops thinking of it not long after she’s woken up. There are never any spirits in her dream. No figures disguised as friends or relatives. No one else except her, and the mountain, and the statue in front of the altar. It’s a little strange, she thinks. It’s not a boring dream, though, and not an exciting one either. It’s just… recurring.

Still, the fifth time she wakes up after watching the sun set into the statue’s grip, she tells her father about it.

“An elf holding the sun?” he asks, and he looks a bit worried at that.

“Not really. It’s just a statue,” she tells him.

He thinks about that for a long while.

“Don’t give it anything,” he decides.

She snorts.

“That’d be inconsiderate. He’s already got his hands full with the whole sun,” she says.

Her father chuckles. But it’s not quite his usual chuckle. And he’s tense for a few weeks afterwards. Not badly so; but he asks her more questions about the dreams, and then one morning he goes and sets out for the woods, and says he needs to practice some magic there. He doesn’t come back until the next day, though, after that, he seems a bit calmer.

The dreams don’t stop.

But she doesn’t want to spoil his mood. So she tells him that they do.

 

~

 

When Malcolm Hawke dies, of course, his belongings are kept by his family. After the worst, initial rush of grief has passed, practicality sets in. Carver gets the things that were father’s that might fit him. Boots and shirts and gloves and coats and suchlike. Anything that won’t fit him, that they don’t have any more use for, goes to the chantry, to be given to the poor. Or else gets sold for a few spare coppers. Bethany helps their mother go through some of the drawers and chests, while Carver broods in the attic, and she pries up the secret floorboard under her parents’ bed and goes through the stash in there.

Magical things. Things not to be touched unless it’s an emergency. Most of them are wrapped up tight, and it’s not much of a haul besides. Her father might have been a gifted apostate, but he was, to be certain, a poor one. In a box there’re some potent vials of lyrium, good enough to slake a Templar’s addiction and possibly serve as a bribe, or be watered down for potions in a pinch. There’s a book on chantry-approved spells, and some notes, which are by far the most precious find.

And there is a pendant.

On a simple bit of rough leather cord, tied at the back, hangs an oddly shaped bit of metal. Heavier than it looks. Something about the outline strikes her as familiar. It makes her think of candles and sickbeds, and then of pathways and snow. Of sunset. But she can’t place anything in specific. She supposes she might have seen her father with it a time or two when she was younger.

Sentimentality more than anything else has her keeping it. That, and the fair odds that it’s magic of some kind. She tucks it into her pocket, and keeps it with her. A few test spells reveal that it doesn’t seem to do much of anything. Maybe whatever magic was in it has been spent over the years. Maybe it needs some ritual or other to work.

She doesn’t suppose she’ll ever figure it out.

The night before Ostagar, she dreams of that winding mountain path, and the sun-catching statue, and the altar. In the dream she traces the shape of the indentation on it, and then pulls the worn little pendant from her pocket, and stares at it.

Same shape, she realizes.

Same size.

 _Don’t give it anything,_ her father’s voice whispers.

She closes her hand, and puts the pendant back into her pocket. And wakes up to a world upturned by far too much chaos for her to dwell on odd dreams and passing coincidences. Running for your life really has a way of narrowing down your field of interests. Most of her father’s belongings are lost with Lothering, and she spares only a passing thought for the pendant crammed into her pocket, and then it’s just enough to move it to the inside of her vest – where it might be more secure – because dreams or no, that’s one of the last things she _has_ from him.

And then Bethany dies and a woman who turns into a dragon gives her another charm; and if it happens to look a lot like the one she’s already got, well. Bethany’s dead and there’s a woman who turns into a dragon. There are darkspawn everywhere, and she doesn’t have much time or patience for anything else.

Flemeth takes them to Gwaren.

The woman’s gaze lingers on her, sharply, for a long moment. It trails down to her vest.

“My eyes are up here, you know,” she quips.

“So they are,” Flemeth agrees, her mouth twisting. “Do not confuse fire for water. The two are rarely successfully interchanged.”

Flemeth’s been saying odd things since they met. She doesn’t think much about it. It’s a strange farewell, but then, the woman can turn into a dragon. There’s a chance that doesn’t do complimentary things to one’s thought processes.

Still.

She’s rather blatantly jealous, just the same.

Then they have to get a ship to Kirkwall, and a ship full of refugees is no place to contemplate one’s valuables or heirlooms. And then they have to get _into_ the city, and deal with Gamlen and smugglers and a year’s worth of indentured servitude, and Carver’s grief turning surly and mother’s remaining accusatory, and the Bethany-shaped ghost that follows her steps and whispers failure in her ear. Makes the knot in her chest hard and biting, and she can’t escape it no matter how light she tries to be. No matter how hard she tries to keep from looking at it.

Her sister’s dead, and it’s her fault. And there’s no fixing it.

She lies awake on the floor of Gamlen’s shitty hovel, listening to the sounds of Lowtown’s slums, as her shoulders ache and her legs burn from a day spent working the criminal underground circuit. As Carver cries and pretends he’s sleeping, but he never sleeps that quietly. As their mother curls atop the lone mattress in the room, clenched in on herself and silent, too.

She wonders if any of them at all are actually sleeping.

And then at last she pulls out the two pendants, and looks at them. They’re not the same shape. But the carvings on them are similar, and remind her of the altar in her dreams. And they’re about the same size. The one Flemeth had given her is on an actual chain, at least. She wonders if the witch would take exception to having it swapped out with the shitty leather cord.

Probably not worth chancing it.

When she falls asleep, she dreams of the altar again. Of that massive, stretching abyss, and the burning fires, and the elf with hands stretched up. The sun’s already set, and she starts out at the top, this time. No wandering paths. She makes her way closer to the altar, but she keeps her hands firmly at her sides.

When she stares up into the face of the statue, it blinks.

 

~

 

The pendant Flemeth gave her resurrects the witch clean before her eyes.

The next time she dreams about the altar, she walks right back down the path she came up by, muttering a litany of curses that essentially amount to ‘hell no’ under her breath.

 

~

 

It’s not until after the Deep Roads, after Carver goes off to be a Warden, after she moves into her mother’s childhood home, after the bitterness has settled against her along with the blackened edge of her memories of pushing through the long, bleak, darkspawn-infested tunnels, that she takes the pendant with her to Lowtown’s alienage, along with a bottle of mead from the Hanged Man, and passes both over to Merrill.

“Where did you get this?” Merrill asks her, staring wide-eyed at the little pendant.

“My father had it,” she admits. “I don’t know where he got it from. It was in with some of his things when he died. It looks like… well, I mean. It looks sort of elvish? I guess Flemeth learned her little trick from the elves, maybe? Or it’s not elvish? I don’t know.”

“It’s elven,” Merrill confirms. Her painted nails carefully trace over the edges of it, and then she flips it around, and looks at the back, too. “Asha’bellanar’s was written with the name of Mythal. She’s our mother goddess. The Dalish pray to her for justice and protection, and guidance. I don’t know quite how Asha’bellanar went about the magic she did for that ritual to work, though. The ancient elves were immortal, but they could be killed, too. Maybe some of their priests were given pendants like these so that if such a thing were to happen, they would still not be lost to death? And then… well, Asha’bellanar has been around for a very long time. If she figured out how to get the pendant to work for her, that might explain how she lived so long.”

Merrill frowns a bit at the charm again.

“This one’s not for Mythal, though. This is for Elgar’nan. The father god. He’s more dangerous, although Mythal can be very dangerous, too. But Elgar’nan is someone you invoke when half-measures won’t… work. Really. You don’t wish them on your enemies unless you wish your enemies were _destroyed._ And possibly all of their families, too. He’s invoked for vengeance. Though, some clans call on Mythal for vengeance instead, since they think Elgar’nan’s a bit… too much, even for revenge. He once dragged the sun out of the sky and tried to destroy it.”

Hawke whistles.

“Fiesty. But I think the real question is, is this one occupied?”

This sort of magic, she thinks, is very much not her father’s style. She knows in her bones that he wouldn’t use it. But part of her can’t help but wonder, too. She’s been dreaming of that altar ever since she was a child. And Flemeth managed to use one of these things to reincarnate herself. The thought that there might be some mountain she could climb, some ritual she could perform, and then, all at once, she’d have her father back…

 _And what will you tell him?_ a voice in the back of her mind asks, sneeringly. _That you got your little sister killed and your little brother blighted? That you let your mother sleep in a rat-infested hovel for a year, while you were running around with criminals, in one of the most anti-mage cities in all of Thedas? Which he can’t set foot in, because everyone knows that he’s supposed to be dead, and also an apostate?_

She imagines the look on his face. The anguished grief of knowing Bethany’s dead. The condemning anger, of knowing his eldest daughter failed them all so badly.

Even so, she thinks. Even so, she’d climb that mountain in a heartbeat.

“I don’t know,” Merrill admits. “I think there’s _something,_ but if there is, it’s probably been there for a very long time.”

“If we took it to Sundermount, and did the ritual again, could we find out?” she wonders.

Merrill shakes her head.

“I don’t think so. The altar we used was dedicated to Mythal. Elgar’nan is all fire and sunlight and wrath and ruin. Mythal is all water and moonlight and nurturing and guidance. They compliment one another as husband and wife, but you can’t really mix them, either,” she explains.

Hawke recalls Flemeth’s words, and deflates a bit.

It was a long shot, anyway.

She looks at the pendant.

“I guess you should keep it,” she ventures. “If it’s so old, and it’s elven, it should probably be in your hands rather than mine.”

Merrill contemplates the item in question for a moment, tracing over it with her fingers again. After a moment she gets up, and fetches a bit off parchment off of a high shelf – optimistically up where the rats would have trouble getting at it – and a bit of charcoal. Hawke watches as she sketches down the details of the pendant, and the symbols written onto it.

“My people are always losing more than we gain when it comes to our history,” she says. “But this belonged to your father. So I think it would be alright if you hung onto it, for now. Maybe when things change a bit you could offer it to me again?”

“Sure,” Hawke agrees. Merrill hands the pendant back to her, and she swallows, and catches her eye. “Thanks. I mean, it’s possible that it’s a demon-infested soul jar and at some point in the near future I’ll deeply regret having it, but…”

Merrill waves her off.

“Oh, I know. That’s part of the reason why I’m giving it back to you. I couldn’t possibly take it to the clan until I knew more, they’re terrible about demons. They’d probably lock it into a box and never let anyone look at it. Or even know it existed, except for the keeper,” she reasons.

Hawke chuckles.

“Better if the demons take me?” she suggests.

“No, of course not!” Merrill exclaims, paling. “I’m so sorry, that was rude of me, I didn’t mean it like that! It’s just that you’re fairly good at handling yourself, and it belonged to your father, and I didn’t want-“

“Merrill,” she interrupts. “Merrill. It’s alright. I was joking.”

Merrill deflates a bit, twisting her fingers together.

“Oh, good. That’s alright then. I thought you were but then I wasn’t quite sure.”

“Not to worry. When in doubt, the safe bet is almost always to assume I’m joking,” she promises.

The pendant feels warm within her grasp.

 

~

 

Her mother dies.

It’s like every crack that’s ever worked its way into her heart since her father’s death is suddenly smashed open by the addition of this new break. Like all the tattered pieces of her have scattered behind her ribs, and it’s just a jagged mess, now. She doesn’t know how to hold it together. She stares into the fires of the estate’s hearth, hears Gamlen’s voice like he’s miles away, and hears her own respond as if by rote. She thinks of tiny little houses, with crying twins, and Carver toddling around after her, and Bethany smiling all big and rosy-cheeked, and her father’s hand around hers, and her mother’s fingers running gently through her hair.

She falls asleep slumped against Aveline’s shoulder, and the world bleeds into fractured dreams.

She walks a winding mountain path, and finds that the fires have died; and charred, blackened skeletons lie among the ashes where they’d burned.

She gets to the top of the mountain, and the statue there is weathered and cracked by time. Half its face is gone. Its hands are blunted, fingers worn down until only the flat palms are left. The sun is red where it sets into them; spilling like blood over the wind-swept edges.

At her back, the chasm yawns, and echoes the deep ache in her breast.

The grief. She doesn’t know what to do with it. Like a little child again, she wants her mother. She wants her family. She wants all the things she lost, because she wasn’t good enough, wasn’t strong enough to protect them. She wasn’t there to save her father. She stood by like a fool and let her sister be killed before her eyes. She dragged Carver through the Deep Roads and let the Wardens take him. She let a maddened serial killer hack her own mother to pieces, because she was too distracted, too busy with her own affairs, too complacent to see what was going on.

She strides towards the altar.

Cold, wet snow catches in her hair, and sticks to the tops of her shoulders. The wind sweeps ash from the unlit sconces, and reveals the hollow stare of yet more charred and shattered skulls.

She draws the pendant from her pocket.

 _So this Elgar’nan guy had a pretty big beef with the sun, huh?_ she had asked Merrill, once.

 _Well, the sun is his father,_ Merrill had said. _Elgar’nan was born when the sun first touched the earth. And the earth made all manner of things out of love for him. Plants and trees and people. But the sun got jealous, and burned so hot that it scorched all of creation. Elgar’nan was furious. He pulled his father from the sky, and tried to destroy him. But Mythal rose up out of the seas and stopped him, because of course you can’t have much of a world without light in it, you know, so she made Elgar’nan compromise, and it was agreed that the sun would set every night, and never again scour away all life in the world. And things begin to grow and were replenished once again._

 _Hmm,_ Hawke had said. _I mean, theoretically, destroying the sun sounds a bit extreme, but when you explain it like that I think I see where he was coming from._

 _I do, too, sometimes,_ Merrill had agreed. _It’s very easy to do foolish things when you’re grieving and angry._

_Very easy._

Hawke runs her fingers over the indentation in the altar.

Then she slots the pendant into place.

For a moment, nothing happens. The wind dies down. The ash from the fires scours over her boots. The red sun sinks lower behind the back of the statue, with its upraised arms. The air goes _cold,_ deep and sinking and silent, as if every ounce of heat has just been sucked from the world. As if the void of grief in her chest has crept beyond her, and swallowed the mountain as well.

She takes a step back, staring up at the statue’s inscrutable face.

Her back brushes up against something warm and stiff and solid.

She halts, and the air around her goes from icy cold to near stifling hot. A pair of arms close around her. Firmly holding her in place.

A deep, unfamiliar voice rumbles up from the figure at her back.

“My thanks, Servant of the Flames.”

The sun flares.

The sconces spark.

The statues eyes open, white-hot and brilliant as fire, and the cracks of it break just as the cracks in her heart had.

She wakes right when the mountains starts to crumble beneath her feet. Scrambling up off of the bed, where Aveline had apparently tucked her in, her heart hammering and her fingers numb as she scrambles for the pocket where she usually keeps…

Where…

Her fingers find only fabric and empty air, and she lets out a long and broken string of curses.

_Shit._

 

~

 

She _thinks_ – she’s not totally sure, but she _thinks_ – that there may be a chance that she might have resurrected some kind of wrathful ancient elven fire mage in her dreams.

And that he likes her.

The Arishok’s charred crispy corpse lies in front of her, as the pillar of flame she’d miraculously summoned still burn across the roof of the Viscount’s estate, and the assembled nobility seem almost like they’re not sure if they wouldn’t prefer to have the qunari still rampaging through the city.

More than a few of the assembled Templars also look like they just shat themselves.

Even Hawke’s kind of freaked out, to be honest, though it probably wouldn’t pay to let the rest of the room know it. There’s being good with fire, and then there’s waving a hand and summoning a damn _tornado of flames_ to _near-instantly incinerate_ a fully-grown and additionally very large qunari military leader.

She also feels a bit bad. Well, she’s felt like shit ever since… but even aside from that, despite the fact that she absolutely wasn’t going to let the qunari have Isabela, and also despite the fact that he just lopped off the Viscount’s head, she didn’t really have too many hard feelings towards the Arishok.

 _At least it went quick,_ she tells herself.

She thinks of blackened skulls in mountain sconces, and has to swallow down an entirely hysterical laugh.


End file.
